Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Thursday May 27, 2010 @12:27PM
from the stranger-things-have-happened dept.

truthsearch writes "An analyst reports that not only will CEO Steve Jobs return to Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference stage — he missed last year for medical reasons — but he will be joined there by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdrey said that Microsoft has been given seven minutes during Jobs' keynote to talk about Visual Studio 2010. Chowdrey said that a new version of the development tools software will support native applications for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac OS."Update: 05/27 19:17 GMT by T: As reader theappwhisperer points out, Microsoft has responded to this rumor via the company's Twitter feed with an unequivocal No.

This doesn't sound like they will port it to the mac. In fact I think that would be pretty bad, the UI is just totally in apropirate. It sounds more like apple is trying to find a way to let people develop for the iPhone and the iPad (and maybe the mac as well) using a PC. This could be very useful for iPhone developers.

While I'm not sure developing mac applications on windows makes much sense, it could be very nice for setting up automated build machines in a mixed platform development environment.

Wow, the last time When bill gates was there to invest a chunk of change in apple development it was partly motivated by MS trying to avoid the Antitrust abyss by making sure MS was not a monopoly (at least on the commercial side).

Now it's a role reversal. MS is at this point in time a Fscked company (Win7 blow on touch devices, WinCE is on life support on phones, xbox360 has lost it's pricepoint sweet spot and is now squeezed by nintendo and Playstation, the big payday product, Office, is seriously thre

For what it's worth, clang already builds with visual studio, and can compile Objective-C code for that platform. I believe it can also be used from the IDE (it isn't used to do syntax highlighting or autocompletion though, so that might be what this announcement is about), and it can already be used to create iPhone binaries, if you have the headers installed.

And horrible syntax? What, having each parameter explicitly named is bad now? Or are you just complaining about the separation of interface and

Objective C is what C++ should have been. It is true that the unconventional syntax drove people away. If you look at the concept of java and compare it to the implemention of java you can conclude that a lot of the late binding ideas of java were fantastic but something went wrong (I am reminded of this every time I look a my process list and see all the big real-memory apps are java, and they take ten times longer to start than they should.)

No one has yet explained what dev tools have to do with competition law for a platform with 20% of the market. This is just another rumor based upon speculation about other speculation. Don't hold your breath.

From ClosedSource, yeah I think it' a troll. Apple has always made political contributions to both parties, mostly democrats. The implication is Apple has changed who they contribute to or how much since the DoJ announced they were making an investigation, but since nothing has been provided to support that claim, he's probably just trolling for responses without anything behind his statements.

I will die a little inside if this happens. I do suspect Apple to do something like this, but I know I'll be changing it right away. Even though Google is staring to become the Evil it once denounced, it's still a great search engine.

I'd love to see enterprise applications available for XServes. Having Exchange, Active Directory, SQL Server, Sharepoint, and other items that are a core part of a company running on an other OS than Windows would be nice. If only for the fact that having a non mainstream OS means that Joe Script Kiddie won't have an exploit for it, and exploits that work happily on Windows just wouldn't work on OS X.

Exchange is the de facto standard for communication in businesses. Having it be able to be run (with its

having used apple's developer tools after spending years using microsoft's, let me assure you that apple's ease of use advantage ends when you open up xcode. sure you get used to gui design in interface builder, but vs is still orders of magnitude easier. therefore, the only developers who would rather stick needles in their eyes than use microsoft tools are those who have never used microsoft tools to begin with.

this, of course, makes no commentary on the quality of code that ultimately results from the use of the respective tools, just the ease of use of the tools themselves.

exactly. its hard to complain about a free product, and i doubt there will be many mac os/iphone/ipad developers who will rush out to spend several hundred dollars on vs for the mac to replace the xcode that apple gives away for free in their development environment.

more likely, microsoft sees the app store for what it is, a cash cow for apple. its thinking may well be that by moving vs to the mac, it can capitalize on developers' existing code bases necessitating only a build step for those developers to t

Its more likely that this will be about VS on windows being able to compile applications for the iPhone/iPad (maybe MacOS but that seems less likely) than a port of VS to the mac.

For one thing, porting a UI that complicated to the mac, would be a ton of work with fairly little pay off. On the other hand, giving windows developers the ability to write apps for the iPhone has a lot of value and lots of people who want to make iPhone apps who dont already own macs (and do own VS) would rather just install an

while allowing a Flash-alike (Silverlight), but not actually allowing Flash (thank god).

Now THAT is an interesting idea.

Because replacing one non-native, slow, bug infested framework written by one of your major competitors with another non-native, slow, bug infested framework written by your other major competitor just makes wonderful sense? Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

This would benefit microsoft - getting bunch of new developers and enterprise customers. And it would also help apple, by getting tons of applications that run (without recompile) on both platforms. This would be simply amazing. And close partnership between apple and microsoft is direct take on google.

Are you sure that you are not talking about the hooks that allowed the kernel to load (but not run) PE binaries? The hooks that were added for EFI support, but which caused a lot of speculation that Apple would ship a WINE build because 'the Mac kernel can now launch Windows binaries!111eleventyone'

I was just talking about the visual aspects themselves, not necessarily the "user experience". Seriously, I find it hard to believe that Microsoft has gone whole-hog using Apple's widgets and UI paradigms; more likely, they've put an abstraction layer between VS's native Windows widget calls and the OS's widget services.

And I had been using Microsoft tools for 15 years before looking at them. Sure, it's jarring at first, but you get used to it. Apple's APIs on the other hand, completely blow Microsoft Win32 out of the water. It's not even close.

And I had been using Microsoft tools for 15 years before looking at them. Sure, it's jarring at first, but you get used to it.

definitely. and it doesn't take a terribly long time for it either. i was looking at it from the perspective that apple has traditionally concentrated on ease of use in its entire environment. having to manually set up outlets and actions in the code so that they can be referenced by ib seems counterintuitive to that history. with vs on the other hand, it "just happens". i.e., double click on a button in the ui view and you get its onclick event handler. if it doesn't exist, it gets created.

Apple's APIs on the other hand, completely blow Microsoft Win32 out of the water. It's not even close.

you ain't kidding on that. even compared to mfc, apple wins. how microsoft managed to promote mfc for years without registry and security attribute classes representing critical aspects of the underlying operating system is beyond me.

having to manually set up outlets and actions in the code so that they can be referenced by ib seems counterintuitive to that history. with vs on the other hand, it "just happens". i.e., double click on a button in the ui view and you get its onclick event handler. if it doesn't exist, it gets created.

XCode and IB remind me of developing with Borland C++ circa 1995 or so. Create the GUI in a seperate app and then load a project in the main IDE to code and compile. VS.NET (And VB before it) simplify it. Create GUI objects, double click on the object and access the code for the events behind that function.

you ain't kidding on that. even compared to mfc, apple wins. how microsoft managed to promote mfc for years without registry and security attribute classes representing critical aspects of the underlying operating system is beyond me.

MFC was a joke. I never bothered to learn how to program with it. Win32 isn't exactly intuitive to build an OO framework on. Borland managed to do it somewhat better with VCL, but it was never popular. do

Apple's APIs on the other hand, completely blow Microsoft Win32 out of the water.

That's hardly a fair comparison. The Win32 API is 15+ years old. It was built to support the previous 16-bit Win16 API. It spans the development of about 8 major operating systems.

Newer portions of the Windows API being introduced with Vista and Win7 are a lot better than most of the older stuff and the integration of.NET into Windows has pretty much given you a completely re-written object-oriented approach to the Win32 API

Apple's Carbon APIs are by comparison at least 9 years old when Apple moved from System 9 to OS X around 2001. However if you count legacy, Cocoa is based on NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP which go back to the 1980s. The deprecated Classic API goes back to System OS which also goes back to the 1980s as well.

The difference between MS and Apple is that Apple went through the APIs during the transition and cleaned them up. I remember reading somewhere that they reduced the number of APIs from 8,000 to 2,000. Apple

And Cocoa is older. It is a linear evolution of the NeXTSTEP APIs, that first shipped in 1988 - many of the classes and methods from then still work. It is a full implementation of the OpenStep specification, published by Sun and NeXT in 1994 (and mostly finalised in 1993). A lot of Mac apps don't step outside of the classes defined by OpenStep, although there are a lot of new APIs outside of that.

Windows 3.11 was introduced the same year that the OpenStep spec was created, and only one year before i

The only hard concept for me was hooking the UI up to code. In VS you double click on some UI element and it creates the action code for you. With IB and XCode you create the action code manually and CTRL+drag a link from the widget to the code. A little more work but once you get used to it it's not so hard.

I honestly like xcode better then visual studio 2005 (the last version I have used).
Personally I like the thinnest IDE I can get. I find xcode to be a little heavy sometimes, but I find VS to be in my way most of the time.

I've had needles [slashdot.org] stuck in my eye. Twice. [slashdot.org] And I paid for the privelede! Beats being blind, and it's relatively painless. Especially if it's a surgeon sticking needles in your eye.

It will be inconclusive for seven rounds until Jobs seriously injures Ballmer with a flying clothesline after Ballmer cheats with a folding chair strike to Jobs' liver. Ballmer will tag in Bill Gates, but Jobs will tag in Phil Schiller. Schiller will then proceed to completely own Gates and win the match with a shining wizard followed by a dragon whip and atomic crotch punch.

The result will be Apple's market cap continuing to stomp on Microsoft's, and the kickoff of Phil's worldwide "Schillermania" tour.

suspect anything its that Ballmer will be releasing his ususual song and dance, accompanied by a free copy of Microsoft Office Chair for one or two lucky attendants. dont worry, it is definitely "Mac compatible."

Apple is great at a lot of things, but writing/porting applications is not one of them. It makes much more sense to extend the functionality of MS's (far superior, IMO) Visual Studio. The extensibility of VS means they don't really even need MS's cooperation or approval... which is pretty fucking ironic when you think about it.

Xcode is free, you just need to pay the $99 to be able to sell apps on the store (which you would have to do on either platform) and opening up the machines you can develop on means potentially more apps in the store. Maybe it might even drive a few Mac sales, by choice rather than necessity.

I have to admit it's a bit out of left field, but stranger things have happened (like Apple going Intel, or Steam being released on the Mac [Valve 6 years ago: "Half Life will NEVER be ported to the Mac" Valve y

Clang already builds on Windows and can be used from Visual Studio. Adding Objective-C syntax highlighting and code completion to Visual Studio wouldn't be too hard (the code for doing it is in clang already, it just needs connecting up to hooks in Visual Studio). Letting people develop for the iPhone without buying a Mac might be a good strategic decision for Apple, and only having to maintain an Interface Builder port for Windows, rather than a complete XCode port, would save them some money.

Microsoft will become less and less important in the years to come when we can easily break their lock-in with all manner of mobile internet appliances. MS days as the 10,000 lb gorilla are coming to an end. They have to reach out or die a slow and horrible death as the need for Office or even the need for a desktop dwindles. I imagine the future where your desktop is more server then client.

I can see it now... Steve Jobs walks on stage after Ballmer finishes and says: That's great Ballmer, but unfortunately we're not going to be able to accept any apps created in Visual Studio, but thanks anyways.

One of the most surprising aspects coming out of this rumor (which is complete and utter BS BTW, I wish I could get a job where I could just spout crazy BS all day, as opposed to just doing it for fun on slashdot:) is learning that people actually *like* Visual Studio? Who knew? I mean XCode has its problems, but I can't wait to get home after a day of working with VS and open up XCode and have some fun do iPhone coding.

Personally VS2005 and 2008 are my favorite dev environments (can't speak for 2010, haven't used it much), I can get a lot done very quickly with those tools. In fact, I know a lot of devs (.NET fans or not, MS fans or not) that particularly think VS is one of MS's best software offerings they have ever made. I also know people who like BOTH XCode and VS. Of course, these days I have to work with RAD (yes, I just threw up in my mouth a little bit).

...about Apple changing it's developer TOS to say that only apps that were originally written in Objective-C or C/C++ then linked directly to the iPhone SDK APIs are allowed on the store, does anyone really believe that they'd now let VS compiled apps on the iPhone? I find it hard to believe that Microsoft would have created a complete IDE for the iPhone SDK to match the TOS as it is now. More likely they'd port the.NET runtime to the iPhone and then their IDE would develop.NET apps like it does now. T

Yes and like I said, MS would have to add a lot to link to the iPhone SDK APIs since it currently is mostly used for Win32. No one is going to code an entire iPhone app in raw C++. Even in a game, you are going to use the OpenGL view classes plus other UI widgets from the SDK.

Yeah sure, Steve Ballmer will very likely speak about VisualStudio 2010 on June the 7th. But this will be at Microsoft Tech-Ed, developper and IT professionnal conference.

How a miss-informed analyst can shake the web by spitting improbable rumours.

(I won't talk about the fact that VS10 is deeply oriented towards the introduction of.NET 4.0 and corresponding C# evolutions, that VS has currently no ObjC parser — and will never include GCC even if it is Apple reference compiler — and that VS GUI editors are built for WinForms and WPF/SilverLight, not Cocoa, so this just ends leveraging their syntax highlighting text editor)

All of my apps are coded in C# and there are thousands of others that I know of. It cannot be a big leap for visual studio to add support as well. The real question is how is apple going to handle the not requiring a mac to compile or publish.

But, seriously, I'm still running Tiger so this would give me an opportunity to try developing for the iPhone / iPad. I've been sweating the upgrade to Snow Leopard because this is my primary machine, my hard drive's almost full and I would need to purchase upgrades for several apps. I've thought about purchasing a new HD then using CarbonCopyCloner or similar software to image it and copy it over. It all seems like a lot of work though...

Grand Central Dispatch is a high level C based technique for distributing computation of heterogenous cores such as GPUs and CPUs. It is open source, but having vendor support from MS might be the key to wide adoption and standardization.

Because they can. Thats one of the benefits of being a software company. They could even start kicking out closed-source Linux programs if they wanted.

Apple's success or failure rides on the brand itself. In each of their markets (aside from ITMS) they are the terminating link in the chain. Its a great place to be when you carry The Big Brand, but its also precarious. Plenty of Big Brands have come and gone while the markets they once dominated have persisted.

All it says is that Apple owns all of its own manufacturing and equipment and makes a LOT of expensive hardware. MS sells software, mostly.

Apples strategy is not as (industry bullshit term coming) agile as Microsofts. If demand for iPhones and iPods dries up, then Apple will be in serious trouble yet again. Apples suppliers will just supply the next trendy device.

Unlike 14 years ago when Apple needed to be bailed out by Microsoft, this time they do have the ITMS revenue stream which I dont see going away any time soon (even if iPods and iPhones stopped selling.) Their computer revenue stream is still insignificant and cannot by itself suppo